The Australasian Triage Scale states that presentations in the resuscitation triage category should be treated 'immediately', which for reporting purposes is defined as two minutes or less.
The maximum waiting times for other triage categories are:
- emergency (category 2) - 10 minutes
- urgent (category 3) - 30 minutes
- semi-urgent (category 4) - 60
- minutes non-urgent (category 5) - 120 minutes
These measures are based on presentations with a Type of visit of 'emergency presentation'.
These measures exclude presentations with a type of visit of 'return visit, planned', 'pre-arranged admission' or 'patient in transit'. Patients who did not wait to be attended by a healthcare professional, were dead on arrival or the triage category was 'not reported' are also excluded.
Patients who left at their own risk or had a missing or invalid waiting time were counted in the number of presentations to emergency departments but not the waiting time statistics.
Presented as a percentage.
Data are not reported for hospitals with less than 5 patients to protect patients’ privacy.
Results are not reported for hospitals with less than 10 patients presenting to the emergency department.